Olga's Gallery

Jean-Baptiste-Simeon Chardin

(1699-1779)

Jean-Baptiste-Simeon
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Jean Siméon Chardin was an artist of the early 18th century.
At this time the predominant form of art was Rococo, mostly associated
with merriment and pleasure. Paintings of elegant carnivals, erotic nudity
and romantic trysts were abundant, while reality seemed all but absent
from the world of art, which is precisely what makes Chardin’s works stand
out among the rest of the eighteenth century. His still-lifes are plain
and unembellished, and depict the real world that he saw around him, rather
than a Rococo fantasy.

Chardin was born in 1699 in Paris to the family of a master-carpenter.
He lived his entire life in the district of Saint-Germain-des-Prés,
where he was also christened at the Church of Saint-Sulpice. He left the
city only twice: once to work at Versailles in 1729, where he took part
in making the scenery for a fireworks display held in celebration of King
Louis XV’s newborn son, and once to help at Fontainebleau in 1731, where
he assisted in the restoration of sixteenth-century Italian frescos in
the gallery of François I.

Chardin’s father and younger brother, Juste, ran the family business,
which mostly consisted of making billiard tables which they supplied to
the Royal Household. Chardin was sent to study with Pierre-Jaques Cazes
(1676-1754), a presently little-known artist, from whom he learned how
to paint. By 1720 Chardin was assisting Noël-Nicolas Coypel (1690-1734),
one of the renowned Coypel dynasty of artists, by painting still-life accessories
in his canvases. In 1724 Chardin was accepted into the Academy of St Luke,
a rival to the Royal Academy, though lacking the latter's royal patronage.

Even though today he is best known for his still-lifes, Chardin started
his artistic career by painting subjects from everyday life. One of his
earliest works is a large shop sign which he painted for his father’s friend,
a surgeon and apothecary. It is speculated that he was inspired to paint
it by the success of Watteau’s Gersaint’s
Shop Sign (1720). Watteau
was one of the foremost artists of the time and his painting was widely
admired in Paris. Chardin, as a budding young artist of 20 years, could
have easily been inspired by this piece.

In the 17th Century the Royal Academy of Painting and Sculpture was
essentially the dictator of fashion for all artists. It had established
a hierarchy of genres in painting, classifying subjects from the Bible,
history and literature as part of the ‘grand genre’ because they were considered
moral or ennobling. All other subjects, including still-lifes, portraiture
and landscape, were categorized as ‘petit genre’, which was deemed to be
much inferior. As a result, artists were likewise classified according
to the subject they painted, and Chardin, who was a ‘petit genre’ painter,
found it an uphill struggle to be recognized and gain lucrative commissions.
In fact, with his second-rate formal education and no conventional art
training, he is said to have felt a severe sense of inadequacy throughout
his career. Even in his older years, he was acutely upset by the criticism
of a fellow artist, Jean-Baptiste Marie Pierre (1713-89), who said that
Chardin had never practiced the ‘grand genre’.

However, the beginning of the eighteenth century saw the Royal Academy’s
influence begin to wane in light of a steady change in taste. Absolutism
in matters of artistic style disappeared with the death of Louis XIV, the
absolute monarch. He was succeeded by Louis XV, then a child of five. His
regent, Philippe II Charles, Duc d’Orléans, favored the Palais-Royal,
the royal residence in Paris, to Versailles. As a result of his move there,
the aristocracy followed him to the capital, where they set up local residences.
As part of this trend, there was a renewed interest in Dutch cabinet pictures,
which were more fitting for their new style of décor.

It is said that a turning point in Chardin’s artistic career came when
he was requested to draw a picture of a hare.
The painting was a great success and he was immediately commissioned for
a still-life of a duck. After this he continued
painting still-lifes, the first ten or eleven of which he showed at the
Exposition de la Jeunesse in 1728. Among the works displayed was the now
famous painting The Ray-Fish
(1725-1726), which was widely praised for its realism. The same year, at
the urging of his fellow artists, Chardin submitted this painting and The
Buffet (1728) to the Royal Academy, and was accepted and almost
immediately made Associate and Academician, which was quite a rare achievement
for any artist, let alone one who had not actually studied at the Academy.

By 1731 Chardin was so well established that he was able to earn a living
off his painting alone, and so decided to marry his fiancée, Marguerite
Saintard, with whom he had had a marriage contract since 1723. They were
wed at the Church of Saint-Sulpice where Chardin had been baptized as a
child. They had a son, Jean-Pierre, in the same year and a daughter, Marguerite-Agnès,
in 1733. Marguerite-Saintard died two years later, followed shortly after
by Marguerite- Agnès, who died between 1736 and 1737.

Although his still-lifes were widely praised, Chardin eventually abandoned
this genre in the 1730s due to a growing scarcity of buyers among the aristocracy
and the nouveaux riches; bankers and financiers who were building and decorating
their new houses in Paris. Instead he returned to the genre painting he
had tried his hand at in the very beginning of his career. Thus when the
Salon opened in 1737, after a prolonged closure due to lack of funding,
most of the paintings Chardin exhibited there were genre subjects.

The height of Chardin’s achievements in genre painting are considered
to be the two works The Diligent Mother
(1740) and Saying Grace (1740),
both of which were displayed at the Salon in 1740 and received critical
acclaim. The same year, when Chardin was presented to Louis XV at Versailles
by his Minister for Culture Philibert Orry, he made a gift of both paintings
to the king.

In the next few years Chardin’s work began to make fewer and fewer appearances
at the Salon, first due to a serious illness he suffered in 1742 and then
because of his being elected Adviser to the Royal Academy in 1743, a job
he was very devoted to and which left him little time for painting. A year
after his second marriage to the widow Françoise-Marguerite Pouget
in 1744, their only daughter, Angélique-Françoise, died at
the age of six months. Chardin, who was known to have painted primarily
for his own enjoyment, was influenced by all these events, which contributed
to his paintings’ growing scarcity and the air of melancholy that can be
seen in some of his work for this time period.

Despite all this, Chardin’s genre paintings were a great success and
found many buyers among the aristocracy in Europe. Some of his works from
this time include The Morning Toilet
(1741), The Bird-Song Organ
(1751) and The Butler’s Table
(1756). By 1751 his work had received royal approbation and the revenue
from sales assured him a steady income. In 1752 he was awarded a pension
by Louis XV and five years later in 1757 he was given an apartment at the
Louvre. It was this year that Chardin’s son Jean-Pierre, who was then a
student and First Prize-Winner for Painting at the Academy -- not surprising
given his father’s standing -- had a vehement dispute with his father over
his mother’s will and left for Rome as a result.

In the meantime Chardin’s workload at the Academy was increasing. In
1755 he was appointed Treasurer and in 1761 he was put in charge of arranging
the Salon exhibition, a rather undesirable and bothersome task because
he was obliged to satisfy all the exhibiting artists with the arrangement.
Although Chardin continued to exhibit at the Salon himself, most of the
works he displayed were either paintings he’d displayed in a previous exhibition,
or had been painted some years beforehand.

In 1764 Chardin was one of several artists, among these Carle van Loo
and François Boucher, commissioned to help with a decorative project
for two salons in the royal château at Choisy. The other painters
were to do historic paintings in the Salle des Jeux, while Chardin was
to paint three canvases to go over the doors in the Salon de Compagnie.
Chardin’s paintings, The Attributes of the Sciences, The
Attributes of the Arts and The Attributes of Music,
were received most favorably by the king, even though Chardin did not receive
the payment for them until 1772. One of these paintings, The Attributes
of the Sciences, has been lost during the French Revolution.

Thanks to his achievements at Choisy, two years later Chardin was commissioned
to aid in a similar project to redecorate the château de Bellevue,
where he was to make two paintings to go over the doors in the music room.
These works, The Attributes of Civilian Music and The
Attributes of Military Music, were completed by the summer of the
following year and were soon afterwards shown at the Salon. Meanwhile the
success of his work at Choisy drew the attention of Catherine the Great
of Russia, who commissioned Chardin to paint a canvas, The
Attributes of the Arts and their Rewards (1766), to go over
the door of the Academy of Fine Arts in St Petersburg.

The following year in 1767 Chardin experienced a tragic loss when his
son, Jean-Pierre, still traveling through Italy, arrived in Venice and
allegedly committed suicide by drowning himself in a canal. Not long afterwards,
by the beginning of the 1770s, Chardin began to suffer severely from an
eye affliction, which is suspected to be a result of lead poisoning from
white-pigmented oils he, and indeed all painters of the eighteenth century,
often used, which were lead-based. This prevented him from continuing to
paint in oils, so he instead switched to pastels and from 1771 the works
he displayed at the Salon were all pastel studies of heads. Some of these
paintings are Self-portrait with an Eye-shade
(1775) and Self-portrait at an Easel
(1779).

The last years of Chardin’s life were made difficult by the replacing
of the Marquis de Marigny, the director general of the Bâtiments
du Roi (King’s Buildings), who had entrusted Chardin with important royal
commissions, by the Comte d’Angiviller, after which Jean-Baptiste Marie
Pierre became First Painter to the French king. Pierre forced Charles-Nicolas
Cochin, Chardin’s friend and the one who had recommended him for both Choisy
and Bellevue, to retire as Secretary of the Academy. Chardin followed in
1774, resigning as Treasurer and from his duties of overseeing the arrangement
of the Salon.

In 1779 Chardin died at the age of 80 in his apartment at the Louvre.
He was soon forgotten and it was not until much later, in the middle of
the nineteenth century, that he was rediscovered by art critics and artists,
and gained a following.